


berserk

by succubused



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Kingdom Hearts III Spoilers, isa adopts xion asmr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-20
Updated: 2019-07-20
Packaged: 2020-07-09 12:51:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19888135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/succubused/pseuds/succubused
Summary: ber·serk/bərˈzərk,bərˈsərk/adjectiveout of control with anger or excitement; wild or frenzied.





	berserk

Isa started to wonder if he had miscalculated.

It had been his idea. Triggered by the fact that she had already tried to use it once, and by the rage the he had seen in her during her moments of lost control, the rage he saw behind her eyes when she forgot to tug the edges of her expression back down over her face to hide it. He remembered turning, vision blurry and too saturated and too bright, blood pounding in his ears at a fever pitch to keep up with what he asked his body to do, and through the haze he had seen her, a clone of his own weapon balanced in the air behind her, practically bigger than she was. Eyes glowing, face twisted, and it was familiar. The frantic nature of her attack on Sora, the unthinking fury of it, had been familiar.

Xion had it in her, and the way she turned her face away just after the anger appeared told Isa everything he needed to know about how ashamed she was. When he had suggested, carefully, that he should be the one to teach her how to channel it, she had looked first surprised, then embarrassed.

_Berserk isn’t an easy thing to control,_ he had said quickly in order to save her the stress of thinking of something to say. _It will take some doing. But it’s a good skill to have, if you’d like it._

Her smile still broke his heart. Xion really was nothing more than a child.

.

.

_“It can’t fight,” Xemnas said dismissively. “It is no longer of use to us. Dispose of it.“_

_Vexen, locking eyes with Saïx across the circle, unable to speak without breaking his facade but equally as unable to hide the horror on his face. The look pleaded with him, once again he was being begged to do something, stop this._

_You’re all that’s left, you’re all there ever was._

_He shook his head. Xemnas’s words. Not his. He looked down at the puppet whose return he had facilitated, curled over on its knees. Shoulders shaking. It hadn’t been able to fight back. It hadn’t even been able to pull the weapon from the air._

_“I’ll handle it.”_

_Five pairs of yellow eyes fixed on him and it was everything he could do not to break eye contact with Xemnas. He stared back evenly._

_“I never expected you to be the sentimental type.”_

_“You know as well as I do that is not the case.”_

_Extraordinary that he had ever believed none of them felt. Even just between the five of them and the puppet the air crackled with it, the hope and fear, disgust and derision, bemusement, despair. Saïx couldn’t tell how much of any of it was his own._

_Xemnas snorted. “If you wish to play with toys—”_

_“We are not,” Saïx interrupted coldly, “in a position to be throwing away such expensive ones. A great deal of research went into its reconstruction. With all due respect, I am not asking for your permission.”_

_For a moment he thought Xemnas was going to hit him. For a moment he wished he would, if only to end the charade early, but he simply blinked and turned away. Empty as always. He didn’t care. He didn’t have the capacity to._

_Vexen hovered after Xemnas and the others trickled away, seeming to want to say something, but Saïx shook his head. Not now. Vexen nodded, hesitated, and mouthed thank you._

_He turned to the small form on the ground before him. The two of them were alone now. He could just barely see the edges of the smooth, featureless face from behind the hood, and he shuddered._

_Remember what he told you._

_Saïx sank to his knees at its side and tried to pretend he was not speaking to a faceless creature with a soul he had been forced to accept the existence of largely out of faith. Lea had loved it. Her. That had to mean something._

_Not it. Her._

_“I’m afraid I’m no Roxas,” he murmured after a moment. “I don’t know how much I will be able to do for you when it comes to your keyblade.”_

_She flinched slightly at Roxas’s name but still did not raise her head._

_“I can help you—Xion?” He hesitated, the name foreign on his tongue. He remembered hearing Axel and Roxas say it, over and over, until the very sound of it was a toxin to him. “It is Xion, yes?”_

_Slowly she turned and looked up at him and what Saïx saw made him sick for a new reason entirely._

_No puppet. No blank, smooth face. A girl, couldn’t be older than sixteen, short dark hair, high cheekbones but the rounded cheeks of a child, and eyes far too haunted to belong to one as young as she appeared to be. They were still blue. Her heart was her own._

_All this time, it had been her own._

_He had been wrong._

_._

_._

Now, looking down at her sitting against the low wall with her arms around her knees, he wondered if he would be able to get through to her after all. She had barely been able to attack him, let alone draw on any kind of anger. She was pulling her punches. She was hesitating.

Isa slid down to sit beside her, and for a moment he let her stare into space, stone-faced.

“Xion—”

“Don’t,” she growled. “I’m not gonna give up.”

He smirked despite himself. She sounded like Lea. “You’re sure?”

“I don’t…it feels like…” She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry, Sa—Isa, crap, I’m sorry—”

“You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

Xion glanced up at him, but not before he hid the stricken look on his face. She didn’t need to know how much it still bothered Isa to know that people saw him and thought of his old name first, it wasn’t _their fault_ , and for all his insistence to everyone else that they shouldn’t blame themselves for any of it, he was especially unforgiving of himself. He had invented Saïx. He had to live with what Saïx had done.

.

.

_She stared up at him. “Saïx,” she said slowly._

_“Yes.”_

_“I can’t fight.”_

_“I can help you,” he repeated._

_“Why?”_

_The bluntness of the question caught him off guard. He had trouble looking directly at her, the pain on her face a punch to the gut in the way only that of a child can be. Doubly so given that he was painfully aware of how much of it he had caused._

_“You…matter to someone who matters to me,” he said flatly._

_“I matter,” Xion echoed._

_“To him, yes.”_

_“Axel?”_

_“Lea.”_

_She blinked at him._

_“That—it’s his real name.”_

_“Real?”_

_“From before.”_

_“What’s yours?”_

_Saïx hesitated. “Mine?”_

_“I’d like to know it.”_

_“I…” He swallowed. Tried and failed to remember the last time he had said his own name out loud. “Isa,” he said, the sound of it as unfamiliar as hers had been. “My name is Isa.”_

_“Isa,” Xion repeated. She rubbed a hand across her face, and he saw that it was shaking. “You always hated me.”_

_Saïx closed his eyes. Opened his mouth to respond before realizing he had nothing to say to that, because there was no point in explaining why, and he suspected explaining that he hadn’t hated her because he would have had to see her as a person in order to feel that way would be little comfort._

_“Don’t let them see your hands shake,” he said. “Hold them together. Like this.”_

_She glanced down at them. “You used to sit like that.”_

_Saïx’s face twisted. He stayed silent._

_Xion looked at him, then nodded._

_“Okay,” she said. “I see.”_

.

.

They weren’t all that different, in the end.

“What are you feeling?”

She looked down at her hands, folded together tightly as he had shown her back then. “I don’t know.”

“It’s all right, Xion.”

She winced at the memory of the last time someone had said that to her. Of course Isa didn’t know. He had barely even been aware of his own name. Sometimes she wondered if that was why she wanted to learn how he did it. To forget.

“Is it?” she mumbled.

“Berserker code of honor,” Isa told her. “We don’t tell on each other.”

Xion stared at him. “There’s a code of honor?”

“There is now.”

She giggled, looking like herself for a brief moment before the look faded into an equally familiar melancholy. “You’re…kind, Isa.”

He blinked. “I…”

“The whole time, and you were just…you cared too much, didn’t you?”

“I wasn’t kind to you,” Isa said flatly.

Xion frowned. “But you were still you.”

“Barely,” he muttered.

She uncurled her fists and as he had suspected, her hands shook. 

“I feel like I should be happy,” Xion said, speaking too quickly as though she were afraid of losing her nerve. “We’re okay. Lea is okay. Roxas is okay. Naminé is okay. You’re okay. For the first time in my life I have everything I need to feel safe, and I still feel like—I feel like _screaming._ I keep remembering—and I just—I’m still scared! And I’m just angry at _everyone_ sometimes, I don’t know why, and I don’t, it isn’t fair, it’s not—” She took a deep, shaky breath. “And that just—it makes me feel guilty. It makes me feel like I’m gonna throw up.”

Isa looked down at his own hands, noticing with some detachment that they were trembling too, and he wondered if it was really his place to be the one there for her now. If he had earned it yet. Xion’s eyes sparkled with tears, and his still-raw heart ached for her.

“Your whole life,” he began slowly. “Your whole life you were in danger. You were told your right to exist was something you had to earn. I am responsible for that. I have to live with knowing that I did this to you.”

“No, that’s not—”

He shook his head. “It is. Listen to me, Xion. You have every right to be angry. You have every right to be afraid. You were living a life—your mind may know that you’re safe now, but your heart knows fear more intimately than anything else, and it will take time to teach it a new way of being. You can’t blame yourself for that. Do you understand?”

“Do you get scared?”

Isa hesitated. “Yes,” he said after a moment. “I am afraid more often than not.”

“And Lea?”

“Yes.”

Xion stared out at the horizon, an unreadable expression on her face, knuckles white in her lap.

“I hated you,” she murmured, almost to herself. “I’m still angry at you, I think.”

Isa sighed in relief. “Well, thank goodness.”

Her head snapped up. “What?”

“I was worried you were never going to say it.”

“It’s not fair to you,” Xion said, nearly in tears again. “I know why you were—I understand now. What you were going through. So _why_ —”

“Xion…” He rubbed his face with the back of his hand. “Just because there was a reason for something doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt you.”

“You aren’t who I thought you were.”

“And you aren’t who I thought _you_ were.”

“I like who you are.”

“Doesn’t make what I did right.”

“But you didn’t even see my—”

“Still doesn’t make it right.”

“Isa,” she groaned, exasperated.

“You are allowed to be angry,” he repeated. “You are allowed to be hurt. Stop telling yourself otherwise. You will lose your mind.”

“You made me feel like I didn’t deserve to exist.”

The harshness of it took him by surprise, even as he recognized he had finally gotten through to her. She stared straight ahead, the poisonous flash in her eyes returning at last.

“I know,” he said as he got to his feet. He offered her a hand and she stared at it as though she thought it would electrocute her.

“You found what you needed.”

She nodded, jaw set. “Okay,” she said. “Show me.”

They stood facing one another, Isa watching her thoughtfully with his arms folded across his chest, Xion looking anywhere but at him as she clenched and unclenched her hands.

“What does it feel like?”

“Feels like there are rocks in my chest.”

“What does it make you remember?”

“Puppet,” she said through gritted teeth. “Called me a puppet.”

“Were you a puppet, Xion?”

“No. _No_.”

“But you never fought back.”

“What was I supposed to _do_?” She locked eyes with him and he saw, somewhere behind her irises, a faint glow was building. “Attack _you_?”

“You were helpless.”

Xion glared at him.

“So tell me,” Isa said, unfolding his arms and shifting very slightly on his feet. “Are you helpless now?”

He managed to move quickly enough to block the majority of the flurry of strikes she landed, having anticipated the timing of it all, but the sheer force behind it sent him staggering back a few feet, eyes widening in surprise. He stayed very still, the ring of keyblade on claymore still echoing across the courtyard. Xion stared at him, looking almost as shocked as furious, and the crimson glow that rippled from the edges of her form matched the light that shone from her eyes.

“Oh,” she breathed.

Isa smiled as his own eyes began to shine.

“There you are.”

He was stronger but Xion was faster, and it almost felt like sparring with Lea again, the way she outpaced him at every turn no matter how many times he repelled her. The difference being, of course, that her particular style of berserking seemed to be fueled by immunity to exhaustion. Isa had never gone up against someone who could meet him in the middle that way, and neither had Saïx for that matter.

She was strong. She was fast. She was angry.

She was terrifying, and Isa had never felt prouder.

Xion slammed her keyblade against his claymore once again, and Isa prepared to throw her off again, until he looked at the weapon for a beat longer than he had been able to before. His own fuel was beginning to run out, colors and speeds returning to normal, and he recognized, at last, what he was looking at.

His surprise made him hesitate, and his hesitation gave Xion the opening she needed to fling him back with a hit that he was certain would leave a bruise, although nothing like what Saïx had sustained at her hands back at the graveyard. For all her rage, she was under control. She had done it.

Isa barely maintained his balance, leaning on Lunatic in a motion so similar to his last concession of defeat that Xion slowed at last.

“Isa!” she yelped, rushing towards him. “I’m sorry—!”

He laughed and shook his head. “I’m all right,” he said, still out of breath. “Don’t apologize.”

They stared at each other as the unnatural light faded from their eyes, leaving blue to meet the still-unfamiliar green.

“Your keyblade,” Isa said slowly.

Xion looked down at it, raising one eyebrow as she saw. “Oh,” she murmured. “That’s new.”

It wasn’t Lunatic, more of a cousin, though close in shape and color, more muted and sleek with a half-circle striking end where his was full, but the grip her hands were still wrapped around betrayed it with little room for question. As the final traces of the berserk glow faded, they watched as it changed shape once more, turning back into the familiar plain key before disappearing.

“I always did like it,” Xion said, running her hand over one of Lunatic’s spikes. “Too big to be practical though. So this works.”

“Did you?”

She chuckled. “Yeah. It’s not like I was gonna say anything. I was terrified of you.”

“Seems as though now I ought to be the one running scared.”

“Sorry, but that—felt _good._ ”

“Good. It does, sometimes.” He fell back against the wall and she took a seat beside him once more, looking up at the clouds stained red and gold by the setting sun.

“Should we go meet them?”

“If we don’t want to be berated for being late again.”

“We were only late last time because we were the ones buying the ice cream.”

“Of course.” Isa looked down at her, his heart suddenly heavy with an emotion he couldn’t name. “You did well, Xion.”

Xion smiled, and this time there was no sadness behind her eyes.

“Thanks.”


End file.
